Writing Lessons

December 17, 2012

“Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.” -- Leo Tolstoy

Artists and yogis alike speak of the power of "inner light" -- a subtle but powerful beam of insight, strength and creativity that radiates from within.

When your inner light burns bright, people notice!

You look and feel more beautiful. You're more patient with your family and friends. You make decisions with courage and confidence.You feel more creative, more whole.

It's natural for our inner light to ebb and flow throughout the year. (That's why people around the world celebrate festivals of light, like Diwali,Hanukkah, Christmas, this time of year.)

So how's your inner light these days?

Is the holiday season making you feel even more radiant, or is your shopping, your schedule or your diet diminishing your inner light?

Here are a few tips to help you stay centered, calm and creative this winter:

1. Think warmth.

It takes considerable energy to brace ourselves for the winter chill when we leave the house, no matter how well we're insulated against the cold. When you return home from a shopping trip, errand or run, take great care to warm your senses when you return home. Get into warm, dry clothes immediately, then take a moment to savor a hot cup of tea or milk, preferably by the light of a fire or candle. Imagine the beverage warming you from the inside out. And let your eyes enjoy the randomness and mystery of a burning flame. You can tuck this simple grounding ritual into your day with ease, and even if you must return to the work of the day within minutes, the effects of small moments of time spent warming your body and gifting yourself with beauty do add up. Enjoy!

2. Be silent.

Winter is a natural time to turn within. If the holiday season is a stressful time for you, time spent in reflective silence is even more critical to your wellbeing.

A few tips for very busy writers:

- Freewrite. I used to open a text document every day before I started work. I'd set the timer for 5 or 7 minutes and proceed to dump my thoughts -- worries, fears, strange ideas and potential creative gems -- on the page without discretion. I'd write as fast as I could, and when the timer dinged, I'd often stop what I was writing in mid-sentence.

Quick, focused writing like this can do wonders to clear your mind and reconnect you to your inner light. Investing 5 minutes at the beginning of a writing session can save you much more time that than later on, because you're less anxious and more clear, calm and happy as you work.

- Journal in lists. When I was in my 20s, I spent hours lavishing the page with daily journal entries. Life these days is quite a bit busier, and honestly, journaling as I once did just doesn't appeal to me right now. What works instead is journaling in lists. No time to delve into a recap of your day on the page? Craft lists of 5, 7 or 10 things and be done with it. Besides being a great journaling tool ("5 Faces I Remember from the Day," "10 Things I'm Grateful For," "6 Places I've Never Been and Want to Visit,"), list-making is a great way to stimulate creative thought and ideas.

3. Think community.

Time spent alone is important. But stoking inner fire doesn't have to happen only in solitude…especially during the winter season.

Use the world to fill you up!

Think about the gatherings, events or occasions that light you up during the holiday season. Do you like to attend a favorite musical performance, spiritual gathering or annual holiday party? Do you take your kids on a favorite outing each year? Do you drive by certain neighborhoods or walk down certain downtown streets to enjoy the lights?

Approach your holiday outings and gatherings as opportunities to delight your senses, warm your heart and share your inner light with family and friends. This new perspective can help you approach everything -- holiday baking, gift shopping, errands -- with an attitude of generosity towards yourself and others. Just remembering "You" in the midst of everyday activities is an act of love and respect for yourself.

These everyday mindfulness practices will help you feel more connected to yourself and happier as you celebrate the season.

October 12, 2010

In today's post (the third and final of my "Writing Lessons from Photographers" series), I'll show you a fun strategy you can use to improve your writing and editing chops. Let's play a little game, shall we?

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"Writing Lessons from Photographers" - Never Shoot a Sunset

Take a look at this snapshot from my recent trip to a nearby beach at sunset.

Grab a pencil.

Now quickly jot down three specific things you notice in the photograph. If you like, write a phrase or two to describe the overall mood or tone the image conveys to you, and I'll do the same.

Let's compare lists, shall we?

I'll go first.

If I'm trying to be objective, I see modest ocean swells, an annoying timestamp I just can't figure out how to get the timestamp off the pics my new little Vivitar handheld camera makes, and--oh yeah, a sunset.

But here's a smattering of what really comes up for me when I look at this photograph:

the scent and feel of ocean air, laced with salt and sand,

the path the pelicans cut as they flew in formation just above the waves,

the pleasure I felt as I watched my three-year-old daughter scrunch wet sand between her fingers and toes, crouching on all fours as she pushed her way up a small incline pretending to be a "streetsweeper." (The fact that she's imposing a mechanical metaphor onto nature--not the other way around--is another subject altogether, isn't it? Aii.)

When you see this picture, I'll bet you're focussed on sand, light and wave. You see what's actually there.

When I look at this picture, I'm taken by riptide to a technicolor sea of memory and recollected experience -- stuff that's nowhere to be found in the pixels of this 2-D photograph. I'm so driven by memory it takes deliberate effort for me to see what's actually there.

"Never Shoot a Sunset"

Steve Szabo, my photography professor at the Corcoran, once warned us rather bluntly: "Never shoot a sunset."

Besides steering us away from visual cliches (and who better to warn than a darkroom full of aspiring fine-art photographers), Szabo's pithy injunction taught us to look hard at the photographs we were making. He taught us to look at each image we made on its own terms.

Szabo taught us to ask:

What overtones, memories or sense experiences are we bringing to our experience of viewing the photograph?

What aesthetic choices did we make to actualize our message?

How did we do and what's lacking?

Had I been striving for "art" in the image above, I would've needed to manipulate expsoure, composition, or any of the other expressive tools of photography to evoke the mood I wanted to create. But to do this successfully, I'd have to first figure out what material I was bringing to the work vs. what was actually there.

Learning to See What's Really There

Szabo's advice to photographers is immensely useful for writers.

On a practical level, if you're still getting your writing chops up, you can save yourself time by avoiding the writerly equivalents of "sunsets" -- those cliche topics that threaten to become overly sentimental or melodramatic.

And no matter where you are in your writing journey, you'll improve your craft by consistently practicing seeing what's actually on the page (not what you recall or think or wish or project). Szabo's advice can improve every piece of writing you do, not just your essays and anecdotes. You'll become more aware of what you're doing well and you'll quickly learn which literary techniques you need to strengthen and improve to get your message across to the reader.

Personally, I've found this gentle practice of discernment enormously beneficial away from the writing desk, too. Learning to see what's really there is helping me become more present, awake and mindful throughout my life, whether I'm coaching writers, loving on my little one or learning a new jazz tune.

Seeing what's there/what's not is a beautiful practice for anyone aspiring to become a truly relaxed writer.

What Do You Think?

What literary "sunsets" will you avoid writing about...for now?

What specific questions will you begin asking yourself as you review your drafts?

How will you practice seeing what's truly on the page and what's not?

Will you try this practice out in your daily life, too?

New on Facebook

I just posted a few photos from my Corcoran days for you to check out. Stop by my Facebook Fan Page to see the new "Writing Lessons from Photographers" photo album. (Just click the Wall link or press the arrow key to access the "Photos" tab.) If you'd like to see a few more, let me know!

Over the years, this French photographer's spontaneous images, taken with his hand-held Leica camera as he roamed the streets of Paris, remain among my favorites. (For fun, I'll include here my 1994 street portrait of a young boy in Mexico City. Not too tough to see how much I was influenced by Cartier-Bresson's "Rue Mouffetard, Paris 1954," is it?)

A former painter, Cartier-Bresson believed in a concept he called "integrity of vision." He didn't believe in cropping his photographic images to improve their composition. Instead, he held himself to a self-imposed standard of "what you see is what you get," and printed most of his photographs with a thin black line around them, indicating that what you see on the print is exactly what he saw through the viewfinder.

Given Cartier-Bresson's "get it right all at once" aesthetic, it's not surprising that he was well-aware of the fact that as artists, we tend to start out..."so-so," and that with time, we improve. This is a simple concept, but one that, perhaps because drafting a new chapter takes us writers a heck of a lot longer than the "decisive moment" Cartier-Bresson needed to compose a photograph, is often very hard for us writers to remember.

We forget that the piece we're working on is simply one project among many.

We forget that our current work represents a single blip in time in our life cycle as writers.

We forget that sometimes progress is incremental and hardly perceptible, and that, if we're alert and mindful, with each page we deepen our expressive powers and learn more (and more and more) how to do our chosen craft well.

Cartier-Bresson's quote is one of my favorite reminders that we develop our writing talent in stages. Consider this the "10,000+1 Principle:" over time we improve. If we log in the hours and practice our craft, we are bound to produce our first "plus-one" piece. Until then, our job is simply to show up and to pay close attention as we work.

Try This

Let's take the 10,000+1 Principle literally for a moment.

Assume that you're a photographer, and you shoot rolls that are 36 frames long. Using Cartier-Bresson's prediction, you'd need to shoot about 278 rolls of film before you move from "ugh" to "decent."

Let's say you're shooting about 3 new rolls a week. If my math's right, at this pace it'll take you a year and ten months to move your craft forward.

Consider that:

if you were to start your work in August 2010, you could expect to shoot your 10,001st photograph right around July 2012. And with that 10,001st photograph, you'll be moving into a discernibly better stage with your craft. If you really want to be a good writer, isn't your long-term goal to evolve your craft worth this relatively brief investment of time?

Here are a few more ways to apply the "10,000+1" Principle to your work as a writer.

If you're writing in a new genre, what would happen to your writing if you gave yourself a year-and-a-half to simply be apprentice: to show up on time, to log in the hours, and to learn, learn, learn?

What would happen if, just for this afternoon, you allowed yourself to focus on craft and creativity - not how your work will be received in the future? I tried this today while writing this blog post, and this simple mindshift allowed me to finish up in record time.

What Do You Think?

How will you apply the 10,000+1 Principle to your own writing? Shoot me a trackback if you blog about the 10,000+1 Principle elsewhere, or share your ideas with us in the comments below. (You can also leave a comment on my Facebook page by clicking here.)

Next Up: "Never Shoot a Sunset"

Stay tuned for the next and final installment of this three-part Writing Lessons from Photographers blog series: "Never Shoot a Sunset."

July 25, 2010

Welcome to my new blog series, "Writing Lessons from Photographers." Today's lesson is part one of a three-part series.

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Introducing the 3% Rule

It wasn't until my senior year in college that I discovered the photo department. What joy!

My first photo professor, Steve Zapton, was known for his direct feedback during class critiques. "Not for babies!" said a recent student on ratemyprofessors.com. Personally, I adored his straight-talk.

Professor Zapton taught me the most liberating of creative maxims: "If you get one shot out of thirty-six, you've shot a successful roll of film."

One shot out of thirty-six.

With this rule, suddenly the blurred, unlit and downright crappy shots on my contact sheets seemed less important. If I could find just one image among all the experiments, mediocrity and missteps that unfurled in the course of shooting thirty-six frames, I was golden.

I could circle what really worked and ignore the rest.

The 3% Rule

Assuming my math is right, "one out of thirty-six" translates into a 3% success rate (2.78% if you want to be exact).

If just 3% of the time the magical mix of light, timing, composition and technique comes together to yield an image that really "says" something, a photographer is on track.

Imagine the creative freedom the 3% Rule offers to you as a writer!

If you expected success just 3% of the time you worked at your writing, would you be a bit more far-ranging and creative?

Would your "new queries" lists be longer? More broad? More daring?

Would you take more risks with your new poem starts and fiction ideas, knowing that you could discard 97% after a minimal initial investment of time?

Would you be a bit more forgiving with yourself as you revise and edit your work?

The beauty of the 3% Rule is that it stops that one of the biggest ways writers sabotage themselves. Instead of judging our creative process as we create (ugh!), the 3% Rule teaches us to retrain ourselves to stop expecting a masterpiece every time.

By lowering our expectations, we give ourselves room to experiment, room to fail and room to play on the page. We can take our 3% and not get hung up in analyzing what the other 97% means about our talents or abilities.

Without this crushing self-criticism, we're free to return again and again to writing.

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Next Up

If you liked this post, be sure to check out the second post in this three-part Writing Lessons from Photographers series: "The '10,000+1' Principle."